Sonic impressions of Axpona 2011

Hi Agear,
Thanks for the very nice show report.Using the Duke Ellington Jazz Party CD is perfectly understandable. I`ve own it for years(superb live recording) it can tell you just about everything you`d want to know about a system/component. It sounds heavenly in my current system(just played the entire CD last night!). I plan to take this CD to RMAF later this year.
Best Regards,

Thanks Charles1dad. I remember you were part of the TRL/Shindo thread. Neither of those two manufacturers were there, but Tron was and that room sounded very nice as I referenced above.

Yeah, the Jazz Party CD is lethal and lovely and requires a balance of dynamism and organic texture to pull off. In lesser systems, it sounds thin, brassy, and annoying. A thank you to Glory for turning me onto that CD.

Axpona was nice in that the number of vendors is far less than RMAF, and thus it is easier to avoid overloading your circuits.

I presume not many people made it to the show, at least ones who want to talk about sonics....

I have a few more impressions to add:

Da Vinci dac: new dac from a company called Light Harmonics made its debut at Axpona. It is an asynchronous dac that is able to process 32/384 via their own proprietary USB module. This module includes another patent pending technology called "Jitter-Free Layer Buffer" that eliminates all possible jitter at the USB-PC interface.

Light Harmonics also believes that the “distribution” of harmonic distortion is more important than the total harmonic distortion (THD). According to the website jargon: "High harmonics makes music unnatural and edgy. The 5th or 6th order distortion will do 100 times more harm than the same amount for the 2nd order harmonic distortion." Thus they have developed another proprietary technology called LOHD (Lower Order Harmonics Distribution) System. LOHD theoretically allows 99.999999% of the existing distortion to be in distributed in the lower (2nd, 3rd, 4th) orders. This redistribution is supposed to produce harmonics that more accurately mimic actual instruments, etc.

So, the question is: how does it sound? Well, I first heard it with a system featuring Wilson Sophia 3 speakers, Pass Labs amplification, a Mach2 mac mini and Pure Music. In that context, it sounded very good but constrained. I later heard it in a room which included Carnegie Acoustics and Leon Speakers, VAC pre-amp and amp, and a Mach2 Mini. I had heard this room the previous day where the Mini was feeding the Tranquility dac. The Tranquility had a beautiful tonality and organic, analog sound. With the Da Vinci in the chain, the sense of space increased substantially, as did the layering and definition of images. I have honestly never heard a digital front end produce that degree of image density. This was most conspicuous when playing the 32/352.8 file of a violin piece. The only bad part of this story is that the dac runs around 12K....